Christophercolumbus and the New World by Fils on Young

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Christopher Columbus

and the New World of His Discovery

By

Filson Young

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Christopher Columbus and the New World of His

Discovery

Front Page ........................................................................................................................... 3Preface................................................................................................................................. 6Book I: The Inner Light ...................................................................................................... 9

The Stream Of The World .............................................................................................. 9The Home In Genoa...................................................................................................... 12Young Christopher........................................................................................................ 18Domenico...................................................................................................................... 21Sea Thoughts................................................................................................................. 22In Portugal..................................................................................................................... 29Adventures Bodily And Spiritual.................................................................................. 32The Fire Kindles ........................................................................................................... 37Wanderings With An Idea ............................................................................................ 43Our Lady Of La Rabida ................................................................................................ 54The Consent Of Spain................................................................................................... 58

The Preparations At Palos............................................................................................. 61Events Of The First Voyage ......................................................................................... 67Landfall ......................................................................................................................... 77

Book II: The New World.................................................................................................. 82The Enchanted Islands .................................................................................................. 82The Earthly Paradise..................................................................................................... 90The Voyage Home ...................................................................................................... 101The Hour Of Triumph................................................................................................. 115Great Expectations ...................................................................................................... 125The Second Voyage .................................................................................................... 128The Earthly Paradise Revisited................................................................................... 132

Book III: Desperate Remedies ........................................................................................ 151The Voyage To Cuba .................................................................................................. 151The Conquest Of Espanola ......................................................................................... 160Ups And Downs.......................................................................................................... 169In Spain Again ............................................................................................................ 174The Third Voyage ....................................................................................................... 180An Interlude ................................................................................................................ 190The Third Voyage -(Continued) ................................................................................. 194

Book IV: Towards The Sunset........................................................................................ 200Degradation................................................................................................................. 200Crisis In The Admiral's Life ....................................................................................... 212

The Last Voyage ......................................................................................................... 221Heroic Adventures By Land And Sea......................................................................... 231The Eclipse Of The Moon........................................................................................... 240Relief Of The Admiral ................................................................................................ 246The Heritage Of Hatred .............................................................................................. 251The Admiral Comes Home ......................................................................................... 256The Last Days ............................................................................................................. 258The Man Columbus..................................................................................................... 278


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Front Page

COLUMBUS AND THE NEW WORLD OF HIS DISCOVERY

A NARRATIVE BY

FILSON YOUNG

WITH A NOTE ON THE NAVIGATION

OF COLUMBUS'S FIRST VOYAGE BY

THE EARL OF DUNRAVEN K.P.

VOLUME I

SECOND EDITION

THY WAY IS THE SEA,

AND THY PATH IN THE GREAT WATERS,

AND THY FOOTSTEPS ARE NOT KNOWN.


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TO

THE RIGHT HON. SIR HORACE PLUNKETT,

K.C.V.O., D.C.L., F.R.S.

MY DEAR HORACE,

Often while I have been studying the records of colonisation in the New World I havethought of you and your difficult work in Ireland; and I have said to myself, "What a timehe would have had if he had been Viceroy of the Indies in 1493!" There, if ever, was thechance for a Department such as yours; and there, if anywhere, was the place for theEconomic Man. Alas! there war only one of him; William Ires or Eyre, by name, fromthe county Galway; and though he fertilised the soil he did it with his blood and bones. Awonderful chance; and yet you see what came of it all. It would perhaps be stretchingtruth too far to say that you are trying to undo some of Columbus's work, and to stop upthe hole he made in Ireland when he found a channel into which so much of what was

best in the Old Country war destined to flow; for you and he have each your places in thegreat circle of Time and Compensation, and though you may seem to oppose one anotheracross the centuries you are really answering the same call and working in the samevineyard. For we all set out to discover new worlds; and they are wise who realise earlythat human nature has roots that spread beneath the ocean bed, that neither latitude norlongitude nor time itself can change it to anything richer or stranger than what it is, andthat furrows ploughed in it are furrows ploughed in the sea sand. Columbus tried to pourthe wine of civilisation into very old bottles; you, more wisely, are trying to pour the oldwine of our country into new bottles. Yet there is no great unlikeness between the twotasks: it is all a matter of bottling; the vintage is the same, infinite, inexhaustible, and aspunctual as the sun and the seasons. It was Columbus's weakness as an administrator that

he thought the bottle was everything; it is your strength that you care for the vintage, andlabour to preserve its flavour and soft fire.

Yours,

FILSON YOUNG.

RUAN MINOR, September 1906.


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Preface

The writing of historical biography is properly a work of partnership, to which publiccredit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to the labours expended. One group

of historians, labouring in the obscurest depths, dig and prepare the ground, searching andsifting the documentary soil with infinite labour and over an area immensely wide. Theyare followed by those scholars and specialists in history who give their lives to the studyof a single period, and who sow literature in the furrows of research prepared by thosewho have preceded them. Last of all comes the essayist, or writer pure and simple, whoreaps the harvest so laboriously prepared. The material lies all before him; the documentshave been arranged, the immense contemporary fields of record and knowledge examinedand searched for stray seeds of significance that may have blown over into them; theperspective is cleared for him, the relation of his facts to time and space and the march ofhuman civilisation duly established; he has nothing to do but reap the field of harvestwhere it suits him, grind it in the wheels of whatever machinery his art is equipped with,

and come before the public with the finished product. And invariably in this unequalpartnership he reaps most richly who reaps latest.

I am far from putting this narrative forward as the fine and ultimate product of all theimmense labour and research of the historians of Columbus; but I am anxious to excusemyself for my apparent presumption in venturing into a field which might more properlybe occupied by the expert historian. It would appear that the double work of acquiring thefacts of a piece of human history and of presenting them through the medium of literaturecan hardly ever be performed by one and the same man. A lifetime must be devoted tothe one, a year or two may suffice for the other; and an entirely different set of qualitiesmust be employed in the two tasks. I cannot make it too clear that I make no claim to

have added one iota of information or one fragment of original research to the expertknowledge regarding the life of Christopher Columbus; and when I add that the chiefcollection of facts and documents relating to the subject, the 'Raccolta Columbiana,'[Raccolta di Documenti e Studi Publicati dalla R. Commissione Colombiana, etc.Auspice il Ministero della Publica Istruzione. Rome, 1892-4.]is a work consisting ofmore than thirty folio volumes, the general reader will be the more indulgent to me. Butwhen a purely human interest led me some time ago to look into the literature ofColumbus, I was amazed to find what seemed to me a striking disproportion between theextent of the modern historians' work on that subject and the knowledge or interest in itdisplayed by what we call the general reading public. I am surprised to find how manywell-informed people there are whose knowledge of Columbus is comprised within two

beliefs, one of them erroneous and the other doubtful: that he discovered America, andperformed a trick with an egg. Americans, I think, are a little better informed on thesubject than the English; perhaps because the greater part of modern critical research onthe subject of Columbus has been the work of Americans. It is to bridge the immense gapexisting between the labours of the historians and the indifference of the modern reader,between the Raccolta Columbiana, in fact, and the story of the egg, that I have written mynarrative.


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It is customary and proper to preface a work which is based entirely on the labours ofother people with an acknowledgment of the sources whence it is drawn; and yet in thecase of Columbus I do not know where to begin. In one way I am indebted to everyserious writer who has even remotely concerned himself with the subject, from Columbushimself and Las Casas down to the editors of the Raccolta. The chain of historians has

been so unbroken, the apostolic succession, so to speak, has passed with its heritage sointact from generation to generation, that the latest historian enshrines in his work thelabours of all the rest. Yet there are necessarily some men whose work stands out asbeing more immediately seizable than that of others; in the period of whose care the lampof inspiration has seemed to burn more brightly. In a matter of this kind I cannot pretendto be a judge, but only to state my own experience and indebtedness; and in my work Ihave been chiefly helped by Las Casas, indirectly of course by Ferdinand Columbus,Herrera, Oviedo, Bernaldez, Navarrete, Asensio, Mr. Payne, Mr. Harrisse, Mr. Vignaud,Mr. Winsor, Mr. Thacher, Sir Clements Markham, Professor de Lollis, and S. Salvagnini.It is thus not among the dusty archives of Seville, Genoa, or San Domingo that I havesearched, but in the archive formed by the writings of modern workers. To have myself

gone back to original sources, even if I had been competent to do so, would have been inthe case of Columbian research but a waste of time and a doing over again what has beendone already with patience, diligence, and knowledge. The historians have beencommitted to the austere task of finding out and examining every fact and document inconnection with their subject; and many of these facts and documents are entirely withouthuman interest except in so far as they help to establish a date, a name, or a sum ofmoney. It has been my agreeable and lighter task to test and assay the masses of bed-rockfact thus excavated by the historians for traces of the particular ore which I have beenseeking. In fact I have tried to discover, from a reverent examination of all thesemonographs, essays, histories, memoirs, and controversies concerning what ChristopherColumbus did, what Christopher Columbus was; believing as I do that any labour bywhich he can be made to live again, and from the dust of more than four hundred years bebrought visibly to the mind's eye, will not be entirely without use and interest. Whether Ihave succeeded in doing so or not I cannot be the judge; I can only say that the labour ofresuscitating a man so long buried beneath mountains of untruth and controversy hassome times been so formidable as to have seemed hopeless. And yet one is alwaystempted back by the knowledge that Christopher Columbus is not only a name, but thatthe human being whom we so describe did actually once live and walk in the world; didactually sail and look upon seas where we may also sail and look; did stir with his feet theindestructible dust of this old Earth, and centre in himself, as we all do, the whole interestand meaning of the Universe. Truly the most commonplace fact, yet none the lessamazing; and often when in the dust of documents he has seemed most dead and unreal tome I have found courage from the entertainment of some deep or absurd reflection; suchas that he did once undoubtedly, like other mortals, blink and cough and blow his nose.And if my readers could realise that fact throughout every page of this book, I should saythat I had succeeded in my task.

To be more particular in my acknowledgments. In common with every modern writer onColumbusand modern research on the history of Columbus is only thirty years oldIowe to the labours of Mr. Henry Harrisse, the chief of modern Columbian historians, the


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indebtedness of the gold-miner to the gold-mine. In the matters of the Toscanellicorrespondence and the early years of Columbus I have followed more closely Mr. HenryVignaud, whose work may be regarded as a continuation and reexaminationin somecases destructiveof that of Mr. Harrisse. Mr. Vignaud's work is happily not yetcompleted; we all look forward eagerly to the completion of that part of his 'Etudes

Critiques' dealing with the second half of the Admiral's life; and Mr. Vignaud seems tome to stand higher than all modern workers in this field in the patient and fearlessdiscovery of the truth regarding certain very controversial matters, and also in ability togive a sound and reasonable interpretation to those obscurer facts or deductions inColumbus's life that seem doomed never to be settled by the aid of documents alone. Itmay be unseemly in me not to acknowledge indebtedness to Washington Irving, but Icannot conscientiously do so. If I had been writing ten or fifteen years ago I might havetaken his work seriously; but it is impossible that anything so one-sided, so inaccurate, sountrue to life, and so profoundly dull could continue to exist save in the absence of anycritical knowledge or light on the subject. All that can be said for him is that he kept thelamp of interest in Columbus alive for English readers during the period that preceded the

advent of modern critical research. Mr. Major's edition' of Columbus's letters has beenfreely consulted by me, as it must be by any one interested in the subject. Professor JustinWinsor's work has provided an invaluable store of ripe scholarship in matters ofcosmography and geographical detail; Sir Clements Markham's book, by far the mosttrustworthy of modern English works on the subject, and a valuable record of theestablished facts in Columbus's life, has proved a sound guide in nautical matters; whilethe monograph of Mr. Elton, which apparently did not promise much at first, since theauthor has followed some untrustworthy leaders as regards his facts, proved to be full of afragrant charm produced by the writer's knowledge of and interest in sub-tropicalvegetation; and it is delightfully filled with the names of gums and spices. To Mr.Vignaud I owe special thanks, not only for the benefits of his research and of hisadmirable works on Columbus, but also for personal help and encouragement. Equallycordial thanks are due to Mr. John Boyd Thacher, whose work, giving as it does so largea selection of the Columbus documents both in facsimile, transliteration, and translation,is of the greatest service to every English writer on the subject of Columbus. It is themore to be regretted, since the documentary part of Mr. Thacher's work is so excellent,that in his critical studies he should have seemed to ignore some of the more importantresults of modern research. I am further particularly indebted to Mr. Thacher and to hispublishers, Messrs. Putnam's Sons, for permission to reproduce certain illustrations in hiswork, and to avail myself also of his copies and translations of original Spanish andItalian documents. I have to thank Commendatore Guido Biagi, the keeper of theLaurentian Library in Florence, for his very kind help and letters of introduction to Italianlibrarians; Mr. Raymond Beazley, of Merton College, Oxford, for his most helpfulcorrespondence; and Lord Dunraven for so kindly bringing, in the interests of my readers,his practical knowledge of navigation and seamanship to bear on the first voyage ofColumbus. Finally my work has been helped and made possible by many intimate andpersonal kindnesses which, although they are not specified, are not the less deeplyacknowledged.

September 1906.


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Book I: The Inner Light

The Stream Of The World

A man standing on the sea-shore is perhaps as ancient and as primitive a symbol ofwonder as the mind can conceive. Beneath his feet are the stones and grasses of anelement that is his own, natural to him, in some degree belonging to him, at any rateaccepted by him. He has place and condition there. Above him arches a world ofimmense void, fleecy sailing clouds, infinite clear blueness, shapes that change anddissolve; his day comes out of it, his source of light and warmth marches across it, nightfalls from it; showers and dews also, and the quiet influence of stars. Strange thatimpalpable element must be, and for ever unattainable by him; yet with its gifts of sun

and shower, its furniture of winged life that inhabits also on the friendly soil, it has linksand partnerships with life as he knows it and is a complement of earthly conditions. Butat his feet there lies the fringe of another element, another condition, of a vaster and moresimple unity than earth or air, which the primitive man of our picture knows to be not hisat all. It is fluent and unstable, yet to be touched and felt; it rises and falls, moves andfrets about his very feet, as though it had a life and entity of its own, and was engagedupon some mysterious business. Unlike the silent earth and the dreaming clouds it has avoice that fills his world and, now low, now loud, echoes throughout his waking andsleeping life. Earth with her sprouting fruits behind and beneath him; sky, and larkssinging, above him; before him, an eternal alien, the sea: he stands there upon the shore,arrested, wondering. He lives,this man of our figure; he proceeds, as all must proceed,

with the task and burden of life. One by one its miracles are unfolded to him; miracles offire and cold, and pain and pleasure; the seizure of love, the terrible magic ofreproduction, the sad miracle of death. He fights and lusts and endures; and, no moretroubled by any wonder, sleeps at last. But throughout the days of his life, in the very actof his rude existence, this great tumultuous presence of the sea troubles and overbearshim. Sometimes in its bellowing rage it terrifies him, sometimes in its tranquillity itallures him; but whatever he is doing, grubbing for roots, chipping experimentally withbones and stones, he has an eye upon it; and in his passage by the shore he pauses, looks,and wonders. His eye is led from the crumbling snow at his feet, past the clear green ofthe shallows, beyond the furrows of the nearer waves, to the calm blue of the distance;and in his glance there shines again that wonder, as in his breast stirs the vague longing

and unrest that is the life-force of the world.

What is there beyond? It is the eternal question asked by the finite of the infinite, by themortal of the immortal; answer to it there is none save in the unending preoccupation oflife and labour. And if this old question was in truth first asked upon the sea-shore, it wasasked most often and with the most painful wonder upon western shores, whence thejourneying sun was seen to go down and quench himself in the sea. The generations thatfollowed our primitive man grew fast in knowledge, and perhaps for a time wondered the


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less as they knew the more; but we may be sure they never ceased to wonder at whatmight lie beyond the sea. How much more must they have wondered if they looked westupon the waters, and saw the sun of each succeeding day sink upon a couch of glorywhere they could not follow? All pain aspires to oblivion, all toil to rest, all troubleddiscontent with what is present to what is unfamiliar and far away; and no power of

knowledge and scientific fact will ever prevent human unhappiness from reaching outtowards some land of dreams of which the burning brightness of a sea sunset is an image.Is it very hard to believe, then, that in that yearning towards the miracle of a sunquenched in sea distance, felt and felt again in human hearts through countlessgenerations, the westward stream of human activity on this planet had its rise? Is itunreasonable to picture, on an earth spinning eastward, a treadmill rush of feet to followthe sinking light? The history of man's life in this world does not, at any rate, contradictus. Wisdom, discovery, art, commerce, science, civilisation have all moved west acrossour world; have all in their cycles followed the sun; have all, in their day of power, risenin the East and set in the West.

This stream of life has grown in force and volume with the passage of ages. It has alwaysset from shore to sea in countless currents of adventure and speculation; but it has setmost strongly from East to West. On its broad bosom the seeds of life and knowledgehave been carried throughout the world. It brought the people of Tyre and Carthage to thecoasts and oceans of distant worlds; it carried the English from Jutland across cold andstormy waters to the islands of their conquest; it carried the Romans across half theworld; it bore the civilisation of the far East to new life and virgin western soils; it carriedthe new West to the old East, and is in our day bringing back again the new East to theold West. Religions, arts, tradings, philosophies, vices and laws have been borne, astrange flotsam, upon its unchanging flood. It has had its springs and neaps, its tremblinghigh-water marks, its hour of affluence, when the world has been flooded with goldenhumanity; its ebb and effluence also, when it has seemed to shrink and desert thekingdoms set upon its shores. The fifteenth century in Western Europe found it at a pausein its movements: it had brought the trade and the learning of the East to the verge of theOld World, filling the harbours of the Mediterranean with ships and the monasteries ofItaly and Spain with wisdom; and in the subsequent and punctual decadence thatfollowed this flood, there gathered in the returning tide a greater energy and volumewhich was to carry the Old World bodily across the ocean. And yet, for all their wisdomand power, the Spanish and Portuguese were still in the attitude of our primitive man,standing on the sea-shore and looking out in wonder across the sea.

The flood of the life-stream began to set again, and little by little to rise and inundateWestern Europe, floating off the galleys and caravels of King Alphonso of Portugal, andsending them to feel their way along the coasts of Africa; a little later drawing the mindof Prince Henry the Navigator to devote his life to the conquest and possession of theunknown. In his great castle on the promontory of Sagres, with the voice of the Atlanticthundering in his ears, and its mists and sprays bounding his vision, he felt the full forceof the stream, and stretched his arms to the mysterious West. But the inner light was notyet so brightly kindled that he dared to follow his heart; his ships went south and southagain, to brave on each voyage the dangers and terrors that lay along the unknown


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African coast, until at length his captains saw the Cape of Good Hope. South and Westand East were in those days confusing terms; for it was the East that men were thinkingof when they set their faces to the setting sun, and it was a new road to the East that theysought when they felt their way southward along the edge of the world. But the rising tideof discovery was working in that moment, engaging the brains of innumerable sages,

stirring the wonder of innumerable mariners; reaching also, little by little, to quarters lessimmediately concerned with the business of discovery. Ships carried the strange tidingsof new coasts and new islands from port to port throughout the Mediterranean; Venetianson the lagoons, Ligurians on the busy trading wharves of Genoa, were discussing thegreat subject; and as the tide rose and spread, it floated one ship of life after another thatwas destined for the great business of adventure. Some it inspired to dream and speculate,and to do no more than that; many a heart also to brave efforts and determinations thatwere doomed to come to nothing and to end only in failure. And among others who feltthe force and was swayed and lifted by the prevailing influence, there lived, some fourand a half centuries ago, a little boy playing about the wharves of Genoa, well known tohis companions as Christoforo, son of Domenico the wool-weaver, who lived in the Vico

Dritto di Ponticello.


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The Home In Genoa

It is often hard to know how far back we should go in the ancestry of a man whose lifeand character we are trying to reconstruct. The life that is in him is not his own, but ismysteriously transmitted through the life of his parents; to the common stock of hisfamily, flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone, character of their character, he has butadded his own personality. However far back we go in his ancestry, there is something ofhim to be traced, could we but trace it; and although it soon becomes so widely scatteredthat no separate fraction of it seems to be recognisable, we know that, generations back,we may come upon some sympathetic fact, some reservoir of the essence that was him, inwhich we can find the source of many of his actions, and the clue, perhaps, to hischaracter.

In the case of Columbus we are spared this dilemma. The past is reticent enough aboutthe man himself; and about his ancestors it is almost silent. We know that he had a fatherand grandfather, as all grandsons of Adam have had; but we can be certain of very littlemore than that. He came of a race of Italian yeomen inhabiting the Apennine valleys; andin the vale of Fontanabuona, that runs up into the hills behind Genoa, the two streams offamily from which he sprang were united. His father from one hamlet, his mother fromanother; the towering hills behind, the Mediterranean shining in front; love and marriagein the valley; and a little boy to come of it whose doings were to shake the world.

His family tree begins for us with his grandfather, Giovanni Colombo of Terra-Rossa,one of the hamlets in the valleyconcerning whom many human facts may be inferred,

but only three are certainly known; that he lived, begot children, and died. Lived, first atTerra Rossa, and afterwards upon the sea-shore at Quinto; begot children in numberthreeAntonio, Battestina, and Domenico, the father of our Christopher; and died,because one of the two facts in his history is that in the year 1444 he was not alive, beingreferred to in a legal document as quondam, or, as we should say, "the late." Of his wife,Christopher's grandmother, since she never bought or sold or witnessed anythingrequiring the record of legal document, history speaks no word; although doubtless somepleasant and picturesque old lady, or lady other than pleasant and picturesque, had placein the experience or imagination of young Christopher. Of the pair, old QuondamGiovanni alone survives the obliterating drift of generations, which the shores and brownslopes of Quinto al Mare, where he sat in the sun and looked about him, have alsosurvived. Doubtless old Quondam could have told us many things about Domenico, andhis over-sanguine buyings and sellings; have perhaps told us something aboutChristopher's environment, and cleared up our doubts concerning his first home; but hedoes not. He will sit in the sun there at Quinto, and sip his wine, and say his Hail Marys,and watch the sails of the feluccas leaning over the blue floor of the Mediterranean aslong as you please; but of information about son or family, not a word. He is content tohave survived, and triumphantly twinkles his two dates at us across the night of time.1440, alive; 1444, not alive any longer: and so hail and farewell, Grandfather John.


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Of Antonio and Battestina, the uncle and aunt of Columbus, we know next to nothing.Uncle Antonio inherited the estate of Terra-Rossa, Aunt Battestina was married in thevalley; and so no more of either of them; except that Antonio, who also married, hadsons, cousins of Columbus, who in after years, when he became famous, madethemselves unpleasant, as poor relations will, by recalling themselves to his remembrance

and suggesting that something might be done for them. I have a belief, supported by nohistorical fact or document, that between the families of Domenico and Antonio therewas a mild cousinly feud. I believe they did not like each other. Domenico, as we shallsee presently, was sanguine and venturesome, a great buyer and seller, a maker ofbargains in which he generally came off second best. Antonio, who settled in Terra-Rossa, the paternal property, doubtless looked askance at these enterprises from hisvantage-ground of a settled income; doubtless also, on the occasion of visits exchangedbetween the two families, he would comment upon the unfortunate enterprises of hisbrother; and as the children of both brothers grew up, they would inherit and exaggerate,as children will, this settled difference between their respective parents. This, of course,may be entirely untrue, but I think it possible, and even likely; for Columbus in after life

displayed a very tender regard for members of his family, but never to our knowledgemakes any reference to these cousins of his, till they send emissaries to him in his hour oftriumph. At any rate, among the influences that surrounded him at Genoa we may reckonthis uncle and aunt and their childrendim ghosts to us, but to him real people, whowalked and spoke, and blinked their eyes and moved their limbs, like the men andwomen of our own time. Less of a ghost to us, though still a very shadowy and doubtfulfigure, is Domenico himself, Christopher's father. He at least is a man in whom we canfeel a warm interest, as the one who actually begat and reared the man of our story. Weshall see him later, and chiefly in difficulties; executing deeds and leases, and striking agreat variety of legal attitudes, to the witnessing of which various members of his familywere called in. Little enough good did they to him at the time, poor Domenico; but hewas a benefactor to posterity without knowing it, and in these grave notarial documentspreserved almost the only evidence that we have as to the early days of his illustrious son.A kind, sanguine man, this Domenico, who, if he failed to make a good deal of money inhis various enterprises, at least had some enjoyment of them, as the man who buys andsells and strikes legal attitudes in every age desires and has. He was a wool-carder bytrade, but that was not enough for him; he must buy little bits of estates here and there;must even keep a tavern, where he and his wife could entertain the foreign sailors andhear the news of the world; where also, although perhaps they did not guess it, a sharppair of ears were also listening, and a pair of round eyes gazing, and an inquisitive faceset in astonishment at the strange tales that went about.

There is one fragment of fact about this Domenico that greatly enlarges our knowledge ofhim. He was a wool-weaver, as we know; he also kept a tavern, and no doubt justified theadventure on the plea that it would bring him customers for his woollen cloth; for yourbuyer and seller never lacks a reason either for his selling or buying. Presently he isbuying again; this time, still with striking of legal attitudes, calling together of relations,and accompaniments of crabbed Latin notarial documents, a piece of ground in thesuburbs of Genoa, consisting of scrub and undergrowth, which cannot have been of anyearthly use to him. But also, according to the documents, there went some old wine-vats


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with the land. Domenico, taking a walk after Mass on some feast-day, sees the land andthe wine-vats; thinks dimly but hopefully how old wine-vats, if of no use to any otherhuman creature, should at least be of use to a tavern-keeper; hurries back, overpowers theperfunctory objections of his complaisant wife, and on the morrow of the feast is off tothe notary's office. We may be sure the wine-vats lay and rotted there, and furnished no

monetary profit to the wool-weaving tavern-keeper; but doubtless they furnished him arich profit of another kind when he walked about his newly-acquired property, andexplained what he was going to do with the wine-vats.

And besides the weaving of wool and pouring of wine and buying and selling of land,there were more human occupations, which Domenico was not the man to neglect. Hehad married, about the year 1450, one Susanna, a daughter of Giacomo of Fontana-Rossa,a silk weaver who lived in the hamlet near to Terra-Rossa. Domenico's father was of themore consequence of the two, for he had, as well as his home in the valley, a house atQuinto, where he probably kept a felucca for purposes of trade with Alexandria and theIslands. Perhaps the young people were married at Quinto, but if so they did not live there

long, moving soon into Genoa, where Domenico could more conveniently work at histrade. The wool-weavers at that time lived in a quarter outside the old city walls, betweenthem and the outer borders of the city, which is now occupied by the park and publicgardens. Here they had their dwellings and workshops, their schools and institutions,receiving every protection and encouragement from the Signoria, who recognised theimportance of the wool trade and its allied industries to Genoa. Cloth-weavers, blanket-makers, silk-weavers, and velvet-makers all lived in this quarter, and held their housesunder the neighbouring abbey of San Stefano. There are two houses mentioned indocuments which seem to have been in the possession of Domenico at different times.One was in the suburbs outside the Olive Gate; the other was farther in, by St. Andrew'sGate, and quite near to the sea. The house outside the Olive Gate has disappeared; and itwas probably here that our Christopher first saw the light, and pleased Domenico's heartwith his little cries and struggles. Neither the day nor even the year is certainly known,but there is most reason to believe that it was in the year 1451. They must have movedsoon afterwards to the house in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello, No. 37, in which most ofChristopher's childhood was certainly passed. This is a house close to St. Andrew's Gate,which gate still stands in a beautiful and ruinous condition.

From the new part of Genoa, and from the Via XX Settembre, you turn into the littlePiazza di Ponticello just opposite the church of San Stefano. In a moment you are in oldGenoa, which is to-day in appearance virtually the same as the place in whichChristopher and his little brothers and sisters made the first steps of their pilgrimagethrough this world. If the Italian, sun has been shining fiercely upon you, in the greatmodern thoroughfare, you will turn into this quarter of narrow streets and high houseswith grateful relief. The past seems to meet you there; and from the Piazza, gay with itslittle provision-shops and fruit stalls, you walk up the slope of the Vico Dritto diPonticello, leaving the sunlight behind you, and entering the narrow street like a travellerentering a mountain gorge.


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It is a very curious street this; I suppose there is no street in the world that has morecharacter. Genoa invented sky-scrapers long before Columbus had discovered America,or America had invented steel frames for high building; but although many of the housesin the Vico Dritto di Ponticello are seven and eight storeys high, the width of the streetfrom house-wall to house-wall does not average more than nine feet. The street is not

straight, moreover; it winds a little in its ascent to the old city wall and St. Andrew'sGate, so that you do not even see the sky much as you look forward and upwards. Thejutting cornices of the roofs, often beautifully decorated, come together in a medley ofangles and corners that practically roof the street over; and only here and there do you seea triangle or a parallelogram of the vivid brilliant blue that is the sky. Besides being sevenor eight storeys high, the houses are the narrowest in the world; I should think that theiraverage width on the street front is ten feet. So as you walk up this street where youngChristopher lived you must think of it in these three dimensions towering slices ofhouses, ten or twelve feet in width: a street often not more than eight and seldom morethan fifteen feet in width; and the walls of the houses themselves, painted in every colour,green and pink and grey and white, and trellised with the inevitable green window-

shutters of the South, standing like cliffs on each side of you seven or eight rooms high.There being so little horizontal space for the people to live there, what little there is ismost economically used; and all across the tops of the houses, high above your head, thecliffs are joined by wires and clothes-lines from which thousands of brightly-dyedgarments are always hanging and fluttering; higher still, where the top storeys of thehouses become merged in roof, there are little patches of garden and greenery, wheregeraniums and delicious tangling creepers uphold thus high above the ground the fertiletradition of earth. You walk slowly up the paved street. One of its characteristics, which itshares with the old streets of most Italian towns, is that it is only used by foot-passengers,being of course too narrow for wheels; and it is paved across with flagstones from door todoor, so that the feet and the voices echo pleasantly in it, and make a music of their own.Without exception the ground floor of every house is a shopthe gayest, busiest mostindustrious little shops in the world. There are shops for provisions, where the delightfulmacaroni lies in its various bins, and all kinds of frugal and nourishing foods are offeredfor sale. There are shops for clothes and dyed finery; there are shops for boots, whereboots hang in festoons like onions outside the windowI have never seen so many boot-shops at once in my life as I saw in the streets surrounding the house of Columbus. Andevery shop that is not a provision-shop or a clothes-shop or a boot-shop, is a wine-shopor at least you would think so, until you remember, after you have walked through thestreet, what a lot of other kinds of shops you have seen on your way. There are shops fornewspapers and tobacco, for cheap jewellery, for brushes, for chairs and tables andarticles of wood; there are shops with great stacks and piles of crockery; there are shopsfor cheese and butter and milkindeed from this one little street in Genoa you couldsupply every necessary and every luxury of a humble life.

As you still go up, the street takes a slight bend; and immediately before you, you see itspanned by the lofty crumbled arch of St. Andrew's Gate, with its two mighty towers oneon each side. Just as you see it you are at Columbus's house. The number is thirty-seven;it is like any of the other houses, tall and narrow; and there is a slab built into the wallabove the first storey, on which is written this inscription:


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NVLLA DOMVS TITVLO DIGNIOR

HEIC

PATERNIS IN AEDIBV

CHRISTOPHORVS COLVMBVS

PVERITIAM

PRIMAMQVE IVVENTAM TRANSEGIT

You stop and look at it; and presently you become conscious of a difference between itand all the other houses. They are all alert, busy, noisy, crowded with life in every storey,oozing vitality from every window; but of all the narrow vertical strips that make up thehouses of the street, this strip numbered thirty-seven is empty, silent, and dead. Theshutters veil its windows; within it is dark, empty of furniture, and inhabited only by amemory and a spirit. It is a strange place in which to stand and to think of all that hashappened since the man of our thoughts looked forth from these windows, a commonlittle boy. The world is very much alive in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello; the little freshet

of life that flows there flows loud and incessant; and yet into what oceans of death andsilence has it not poured since it carried forth Christopher on its stream! One thinks of thecontinent of that New World that he discovered, and all the teeming millions of humanlives that have sprung up and died down, and sprung up again, and spread and increasedthere; all the ploughs that have driven into its soil, the harvests that have ripened, thewaving acres and miles of grain that have answered the call of Spring and Autumn sincefirst the bow of his boat grated on the shore of Guanahani. And yet of the two scenes thisnarrow shuttered house in a bye-street of Genoa is at once the more wonderful and morecredible; for it contains the elements of the other. Walls and floors and a roof, a place toeat and sleep in, a place to work and found a family, and give tangible environment to ahuman soulthere is all human enterprise and discovery, effort, adventure, and life in

that.

If Christopher wanted to go down to the sea he would have to pass under the Gate of St.Andrew, with the old prison, now pulled down to make room for the modern buildings,on his right, and go down the Salita del Prione, which is a continuation of the Vico Drittodi Ponticello. It slopes downwards from the Gate as the first street sloped upwards to it;and it contains the same assortment of shops and of houses, the same mixture ofhandicrafts and industries, as were seen in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello. Presently hewould come to the Piazza dell' Erbe, where there is no grass, but only a pleasant circle oflittle houses and shops, with already a smack of the sea in them, chiefly suggested by theshops of instrument-makers, where to-day there are compasses and sextants andchronometers. Out of the Piazza you come down the Via di San Donato and into thePiazza of that name, where for over nine centuries the church of San Donato has facedthe sun and the weather. From there Christopher's young feet would follow the windingVia di San Bernato, a street also inhabited by craftsmen and workers in wood and metal;and at the last turn of it, a gash of blue between the two cliffwalls of houses, you see theMediterranean.


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Here, then, between the narrow little house by the Gate and the clamour and business ofthe sea-front, our Christopher's feet carried him daily during some part of his childishlife. What else he did, what he thought and felt, what little reflections he had, are butmatters of conjecture. Genoa will tell you nothing more. You may walk over the veryspot where he was born; you may unconsciously tread in the track of his vanished feet;

you may wander about the wharves of the city, and see the ships loading and unloadingdifferent ships, but still trafficking in commodities not greatly different from those of hisday; you may climb the heights behind Genoa, and look out upon the great curving Gulffrom Porto Fino to where the Cape of the western Riviera dips into the sea; you may walkalong the coast to Savona, where Domenico had one of his many habitations, where hekept the tavern, and whither Christopher's young feet must also have walked; and youmay come back and search again in the harbour, from the old Mole and the Bank of St.George to where the port and quays stretch away to the medley of sailing-ships andsteamers; but you will not find any sign or trace of Christopher. No echo of the littlevoice that shrilled in the narrow street sounds in the Vico Dritto; the houses stand gauntand straight, with a brilliant strip of blue sky between their roofs and the cool street

beneath; but they give you nothing of what you seek. If you see a little figure runningtowards you in a blue smock, the head fair-haired, the face blue-eyed and a little freckledwith the strong sunshine, it is not a real figure; it is a child of your dreams and a ghost ofthe past. You may chase him while he runs about the wharves and stumbles over theropes, but you will never catch him. He runs before you, zigzagging over the cobbles, upthe sunny street, into the narrow house; out again, running now towards the Duomo,hiding in the porch of San Stefano, where the weavers held their meetings; back againalong the wharves; surely he is hiding behind that mooring-post! But you look, and he isnot therenothing but the old harbour dust that the wind stirs into a little eddy while youlook. For he belongs not to you or me, this child; he is not yet enslaved to the greatpurpose, not yet caught up into the machinery of life. His eye has not yet caught the fireof the sun setting on a western sea; he is still free and happy, and belongs only to thosewho love him. Father and mother, brothers Bartolomeo and Giacomo, sister Biancinetta,aunts, uncles, and cousins possibly, and possibly for a little while an old grandmother atQuintothese were the people to whom that child belonged. The little life of his firstdecade, unviolated by documents or history, lives happily in our dreams, as blank assunshine.


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Young Christopher

Christopher was fourteen years old when he first went to sea. That is his own statement,and it is one of the few of his autobiographical utterances that we need not doubt. Fromit, and from a knowledge of certain other dates, we are able to construct some vague

picture of his doings before he left Italy and settled in Portugal. Already in his youngheart he was feeling the influence that was to direct and shape his destiny; already,towards his home in Genoa, long ripples from the commotion of maritime adventure inthe West were beginning to spread. At the age of ten he was apprenticed to his father,who undertook, according to the indentures, to provide him with board and lodging, ablue gabardine and a pair of good shoes, and various other matters in return for hisservice. But there is no reason to suppose that he ever occupied himself very much withwool-weaving. He had a vocation quite other than that, and if he ever did make any cloththere must have been some strange thoughts and imaginings woven into it, as he plied theshuttle. Most of his biographers, relying upon a doubtful statement in the life of himwritten by his son Ferdinand, would have us send him at the age of twelve to the distant

University of Pavia, there, poor mite, to sit at the feet of learned professors studyingLatin, mathematics, and cosmography; but fortunately it is not necessary to believe soimprobable a statement. What is much more likely about his educationfor education hehad, although not of the superior kind with which he has been creditedis that in theblank, sunny time of his childhood he was sent to one of the excellent schools establishedby the weavers in their own quarter, and that there or afterwards he came under someinfluence, both religious and learned, which stamped him the practical visionary that heremained throughout his life. Thereafter, between his sea voyagings and expeditionsabout the Mediterranean coasts, he no doubt acquired knowledge in the only reallypractical way that it can be acquired; that is to say, he received it as and when he neededit. What we know is that he had in later life some knowledge of the works of Aristotle,

Julius Caesar, Seneca, Pliny, and Ptolemy; of Ahmet-Ben-Kothair the Arabic astronomer,Rochid the Arabian, and the Rabbi Samuel the Jew; of Isadore the Spaniard, and Bedeand Scotus the Britons; of Strabo the German, Gerson the Frenchman, and Nicolaus deLira the Italian. These names cover a wide range, but they do not imply universityeducation. Some of them merely suggest acquaintance with the 'Imago Mundi'; othersimply that selective faculty, the power of choosing what can help a man's purpose and ofrejecting what is useless to it, that is one of the marks of genius, and an outward sign ofthe inner light.

We must think of him, then, at school in Genoa, grinding out the tasks that are thecommon heritage of all small boys; working a little at the weaving, interestedly enough at

first, no doubt, while the importance of having a loom appealed to him, but also no doubtrapidly cooling off in his enthusiasm as the pastime became a task, and the restriction ofindoor life began to be felt. For if ever there was a little boy who loved to idle about thewharves and docks, here was that little boy. It was here, while he wandered about thecrowded quays and listened to the medley of talk among the foreign sailors, and lookedbeyond the masts of the ships into the blue distance of the sea, that the desire to wanderand go abroad upon the face of the waters must first have stirred in his heart. Thewharves of Genoa in those days combined in themselves all the richness of romance and


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adventure, buccaneering, trading, and treasure-snatching, that has ever crowded the pagesof romance. There were galleys and caravels, barques and feluccas, pinnaces andcaraccas. There were slaves in the galleys, and bowmen to keep the slaves in subjection.There were dark-bearded Spaniards, fair-haired Englishmen; there were Greeks, andIndians, and Portuguese. The bales of goods on the harbour-side were eloquent of distant

lands, and furnished object lessons in the only geography that young Christopher waslikely to be learning. There was cotton from Egypt, and tin and lead from Southampton.There were butts of Malmsey from Candia; aloes and cassia and spices from Socotra;rhubarb from Persia; silk from India; wool from Damascus, raw wool also from Calaisand Norwich. No wonder if the little house in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello became toonarrow for the boy; and no wonder that at the age of fourteen he was able to have hisway, and go to sea. One can imagine him gradually acquiring an influence over his father,Domenico, as his will grew stronger and firmerhe with one grand object in life,Domenico with none; he with a single clear purpose, and Domenico with innumerablecloudy ones. And so, on some day in the distant past, there were farewells and anxioushearts in the weaver's house, and Christopher, member of the crew of some trading

caravel or felucca, a diminishing object to the wet eyes of his mother, sailed away, andfaded into the blue distance.

They had lost him, although perhaps they did not realise it; from the moment of his firstvoyage the sea claimed him as her own. Widening horizons, slatting of cords and sails inthe wind, storms and stars and strange landfalls and long idle calms, thunder of surges,tingle of spray, and eternal labouring and threshing and cleaving of infinite watersthesewere to be his portion and true home hereafter. Attendances at Court, conferences withlearned monks and bishops, sojourns on lonely islands, love under stars in the gay, sun-smitten Spanish towns, governings and parleyings in distant, undreamed-of landsthesewere to be but incidents in his true life, which was to be fulfilled in the solitude of sea

watches.

When he left his home on this first voyage, he took with him one other thing besides therestless longing to escape beyond the line of sea and sky. Let us mark well thispossession of his, for it was his companion and guiding-star throughout a long anddifficult life, his chart and compass, astrolabe and anchor, in one. Religion has in ourdays fallen into decay among men of intellect and achievement. The world has thrown it,like a worn garment or an old skin, from off its body, the thing itself being no longer realand alive, and in harmony with the life of an age that struggles towards a different kind oftruth. It is hard, therefore, for us to understand exactly how the religion of Columbusentered so deeply into his life and brooded so widely over his thoughts.

Hardest of all is it for people whose only experience of religion is of Puritan inheritanceto comprehend how, in the fifteenth century, the strong intellect was strengthened, andthe stout heart fortified, by the thought of hosts of saints and angels hovering above aman's incomings and outgoings to guide and protect him. Yet in an age that really had thegift of faith, in which religion was real and vital, and part of the business of every man'sdaily life; in which it stood honoured in the world, loaded with riches, crowned withlearning, wielding government both temporal and spiritual, it was a very brave panoply


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for the soul of man. The little boy in Genoa, with the fair hair and blue eyes and gravefreckled face that made him remarkable among his dark companions, had no doubt earlyreceived and accepted the vast mysteries of the Christian faith; and as that other mysterybegan to grow in his mind, and that idea of worlds that might lie beyond the sea-linebegan to take shape in his thoughts, he found in the holy wisdom of the prophets, and the

inspired writings of the fathers, a continual confirmation of his faith. The full convictionof these things belongs to a later period of his life; but probably, during his firstvoyagings in the Mediterranean, there hung in his mind echoes of psalms and propheciesthat had to do with things beyond the world of his vision and experience. The sun, whosegoing forth is to the end of heaven, his circuit back to the end of it, and from whose heatthere is nothing hid; the truth, holy and prevailing, that knows no speech nor languagewhere its voice is not heard; the great and wide sea, with its creeping things innumerable,and beasts small and greatno wonder if these things impressed him, and if gradually, ashis way fell clearer before him, and the inner light began to shine more steadily, he cameto believe that he had a special mission to carry the torch of the faith across the Sea ofDarkness, and be himself the bearer of a truth that was to go through all the earth, and of

words that were to travel to the world's end.

In this faith, then, and with this equipment, and about the year 1465, ChristopherColumbus began his sea travels. His voyages would be doubtless at first much along thecoasts, and across to Alexandria and the Islands. There would be returnings to Genoa,and glad welcomings by the little household in the narrow street; in 1472 and 1473 hewas with his father at Savona, helping with the wool-weaving and tavern-keeping;possibly also there were interviews with Benincasa, who was at that time living in Genoa,and making his famous sea-charts. Perhaps it was in his studio that Christopher first sawa chart, and first fell in love with the magic that can transfer the shapes of oceans andcontinents to a piece of paper. Then he would be off again in another ship, to the GoldenHorn perhaps, or the Black Sea, for the Genoese had a great Crimean trade. This is allconjecture, but very reasonable conjecture; what we know for a fact is that he saw thewhite gum drawn from the lentiscus shrubs in Chio at the time of their flowering; thatfragrant memory is preserved long afterwards in his own writings, evoked by someincident in the newly-discovered islands of the West. There are vague rumours andstories of his having been engaged in various expeditionsamong them one fitted out inGenoa by John of Anjou to recover the kingdom of Naples for King Rene of Provence;but there is no reason to believe these rumours: good reason to disbelieve them, rather.

The lives that the sea absorbs are passed in a great variety of adventure and experience,but so far as the world is concerned they are passed in a profound obscurity; and we neednot wonder that of all the mariners who used those seas, and passed up and down, andheld their course by the stars, and reefed their sails before the sudden squalls that camedown from the mountains, and shook them out again in the calm sunshine that followed,there is no record of the one among their number who was afterwards to reef and steerand hold his course to such mighty purpose. For this period, then, we must leave him tothe sea, and to the vast anonymity of sea life.


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Domenico

Christopher is gone, vanished over that blue horizon; and the tale of life in Genoa goes onwithout him very much as before, except that Domenico has one apprentice less, and, amatter becoming of some importance in the narrow condition of his finances, one boyless to feed and clothe. For good Domenico, alas! is no economist. Those hardyadventures of his in the buying and selling line do not prosper him; the tavern does notpay; perhaps the tavern-keeper is too hospitable; at any rate, things are not going well.And yet Domenico had a good start; as his brother Antonio has doubtless often told him,he had the best of old Giovanni's inheritance; he had the property at Quinto, and otherproperty at Ginestreto, and some ground rents at Pradella; a tavern at Savona, a shopthere and at Genoareally, Domenico has no excuse for his difficulties. In 1445 he wasselling land at Quinto, presumably with the consent of old Giovanni, if he was still alive;

and if he was not living, then immediately after his death, in the first pride of possession.

In 1450 he bought a pleasant house at Quarto, a village on the sea-shore about a mile tothe west of Quinto and about five miles to the east of Genoa. It was probably a purespeculation, as he immediately leased the house for two years, and never lived in ithimself, although it was a pleasant place, with an orchard of olives and figs and variousother trees'arboratum olivis ficubus et aliis diversis arboribus'. His next recordedtransaction is in 1466, when he went security for a friend, doubtless with disastrousresults. In 1473 he sold the house at the Olive Gate, that suburban dwelling whereprobably Christopher was born, and in 1474 he invested the proceeds of that sale in apiece of land which I have referred to before, situated in the suburbs of Savona, with

which were sold those agreeable and useless wine-vats. Domenico was living at Savonathen, and the property which he so fatuously acquired consisted of two large pieces ofland on the Via Valcalda, containing a few vines, a plantation of fruit-trees, and a largearea of shrub and underwood. The price, however, was never paid in full, and was thecause of a lawsuit which dragged on for forty years, and was finally settled by Don DiegoColumbus, Christopher's son, who sent a special authority from Hispaniola.

Owing, no doubt, to the difficulties that this un fortunate purchase plunged him into,Domenico was obliged to mortgage his house at St. Andrew's Gate in the year 1477; andin 1489 he finally gave it up to Jacob Baverelus, the cheese-monger, his son-in-law.Susanna, who had been the witness of his melancholy transactions for so many years, andpossibly the mainstay of that declining household, died in 1494; but not, we may hope,before she had heard of the fame of her son Christopher. Domenico, in receipt of apension from the famous Admiral of the Ocean, and no doubt talking with a deal of prideand inaccuracy about the discovery of the New World, lived on until 1498; when he diedalso, and vanished out of this world. He had fulfilled a noble destiny in being the fatherof Christopher Columbus.


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Sea Thoughts

The long years that Christopher Columbus spent at sea in making voyages to and fromhis home in Genoa, years so blank to us, but to him who lived them so full of life andactive growth, were most certainly fruitful in training and equipping him for that futurecareer of which as yet, perhaps, he did not dream. The long undulating waves of theMediterranean, with land appearing and dissolving away in the morning and eveningmists, the business of ship life, harsh and rough in detail, but not too absorbing to themind of a common mariner to prevent any thoughts he might have finding room to growand take shape; sea breezes, sea storms, sea calms; these were the setting of hisknowledge and experience as he fared from port to port and from sea to sea. He is a very

elusive figure in that environment of misty blue, very hard to hold and identify, very shyof our scrutiny, and inaccessible even to our speculation. If we would come up with him,and place ourselves in some kind of sympathy with the thoughts that were forming in hisbrain, it is necessary that we should, for the moment, forget much of what we know of theworld, and assume the imperfect knowledge of the globe that man possessed in thoseyears when Columbus was sailing the Mediterranean.

That the earth was a round globe of land and water was a fact that, after manycontradictions and uncertainties, intelligent men had by this time accepted. A consciousknowledge of the world as a whole had been a part of human thought for many hundredsof years; and the sphericity of the earth had been a theory in the sixth century before

Christ. In the fourth century Aristotle had watched the stars and eclipses; in the thirdcentury Eratosthenes had measured a degree of latitude, and measured it wrong;[Not sovery wrong. D.W.]in the second century the philosopher Crates had constructed a rudesort of globe, on which were marked the known kingdoms of the earth, and some alsounknown. With the coming of the Christian era the theory of the roundness of the earthbegan to be denied; and as knowledge and learning became gathered into the hands of theChurch they lost something of their clarity and singleness, and began to be usedarbitrarily as evidence for or against other and less material theories. St. Chrysostomopposed the theory of the earth's roundness; St. Isidore taught it; and so also did St.Augustine, as we might expect from a man of his wisdom who lived so long in amonastery that looked out to sea from a high point, and who wrote the words 'Ubimagnitudo, ibi veritas'. In the sixth century of the Christian era Bishop Cosmas gavemuch thought to this matter of a round world, and found a new argument which to hismind (poor Cosmas!) disposed of it very clearly; for he argued that, if the world wereround, the people dwelling at the antipodes could not see Christ at His coming, and thattherefore the earth was not round. But Bede, in the eighth century, established it finally asa part of human knowledge that the earth and all the heavenly bodies were spheres, andafter that the fact was not again seriously disputed.


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What lay beyond the frontier of the known was a speculation inseparable from the spiritof exploration. Children, and people who do not travel, are generally content, when theirthoughts stray beyond the paths trodden by their feet, to believe that the greater world isbut a continuation on every side of their own environment; indeed, without the help ofsight or suggestion, it is almost impossible to believe anything else. If you stand on an

eminence in a great plain and think of the unseen country that lies beyond the horizon,trying to visualise it and imagine that you see it, the eye of imagination can only see thecontinuance or projection of what is seen by the bodily sight. If you think, you canoccupy the invisible space with a landscape made up from your own memory andknowledge: you may think of mountain chains and rivers, although there are none visibleto your sight, or you may imagine vast seas and islands, oceans and continents. This,however, is thought, not pure imagination; and even so, with every advantage of thoughtand knowledge, you will not be able to imagine beyond your horizon a space of sea sowide that the farther shore is invisible, and yet imagine the farther shore also. You willsee America across the Atlantic and Japan across the Pacific; but you cannot see, in onesingle effort of the imagination, an Atlantic of empty blue water stretching to an empty

horizon, another beyond that equally vast and empty, another beyond that, and so on untilyou have spanned the thousand horizons that lie between England and America. Themind, that is to say, works in steps and spans corresponding to the spans of physicalsight; it cannot clear itself enough from the body, or rise high enough beyond experience,to comprehend spaces so much vaster than anything ever seen by the eye of man. So alsowith the stretching of the horizon which bounded human knowledge of the earth. Itmoved step by step; if one of Prince Henry's captains, creeping down the west coast ofAfrica, discovered a cape a hundred miles south of the known world, the most he couldprobably do was to imagine that there might lie, still another hundred miles farther south,another cape; to sail for it in faith and hope, to find it, and to imagine another possibilityyet another hundred miles away. So far as experience went back, faith could lookforward. It is thus with the common run of mankind; yesterday's march is the measure ofto-morrow's; as much as they have done once, they may do again; they fear it will be notmuch more; they hope it may be not much less.

The history of the exploration of the world up to the day when Columbus set sail fromPalos is just such a history of steps. The Phoenicians coasting from harbour to harbourthrough the Mediterranean; the Romans marching from camp to camp, from country tocountry; the Jutes venturing in their frail craft into the stormy northern seas, makingvoyages a little longer and more daring every time, until they reached England; thecaptains of Prince Henry of Portugal feeling their way from voyage to voyage down thecoast of Africathere are no bold flights into the incredible here, but patient andbusiness-like progress from one stepping-stone to another. Dangers and hardships therewere, and brave followings of the faint will-o'-the-wisp of faith in what lay beyond; butthere were no great launchings into space. They but followed a line that was thecontinuance or projection of the line they had hitherto followed; what they did was braveand glorious, but it was reasonable. What Columbus did, on the contrary, was, as we shallsee later, against all reason and knowledge. It was a leap in the dark towards some starinvisible to all but him; for he who sets forth across the desert sand or sea must have abrighter sun to guide him than that which sets and rises on the day of the small man.


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Our familiarity with maps and atlases makes it difficult for us to think of the world inother terms than those of map and diagram; knowledge and science have focussed thingsfor us, and our imagination has in consequence shrunk. It is almost impossible, whenthinking of the earth as a whole, to think about it except as a picture drawn, or as a smallglobe with maps traced upon it. I am sure that our imagination has a far narrower angle

to borrow a term from the science of lensesthan the imagination of men who lived inthe fifteenth century. They thought of the world in its actual termsseas, islands,continents, gulfs, rivers, oceans. Columbus had seen maps and chartsamong them thefamous 'portolani' of Benincasa at Genoa; but I think it unlikely that he was so familiarwith them as to have adopted their terms in his thoughts about the earth. He had seen theMediterranean and sailed upon it before he had seen a chart of it; he knew a good deal ofthe world itself before he had seen a map of it. He had more knowledge of the actualearth and sea than he had of pictures or drawings of them; and therefore, if we are to keepin sympathetic touch with him, we must not think too closely of maps, but of land and seathemselves.

The world that Columbus had heard about as being within the knowledge of menextended on the north to Iceland and Scandinavia, on the south to a cape one hundredmiles south of the Equator, and to the east as far as China and Japan. North and Southwere not important to the spirit of that time; it was East and West that men thought ofwhen they thought of the expansion and the discovery of the world. And although theyadmitted that the earth was a sphere, I think it likely that they imagined (although theimagination was contrary to their knowledge) that the line of West and East was farlonger, and full of vaster possibilities, than that of North and South. North was familiarground to themone voyage to England, another to Iceland, another to Scandinavia;there was nothing impossible about that. Southward was another matter; but even herethere was no ambition to discover the limit of the world. It is an error continually madeby the biographers of Columbus that the purpose of Prince Henry's explorations down thecoast of Africa was to find a sea road to the West Indies by way of the East. It wasnothing of the kind. There was no idea in the minds of the Portuguese of the land whichColumbus discovered, and which we now know as the West Indies. Mr. Vignaudcontends that the confusion arose from the very loose way in which the term India wasapplied in the Middle Ages. Several Indias were recognised. There was an India beyondthe Ganges; a Middle India between the Ganges and the Indus; and a Lesser India, inwhich were included Arabia, Abyssinia, and the countries about the Red Sea. Thesedivisions were, however, quite vague, and varied in different periods. In the time ofColumbus the word India meant the kingdom of Prester John, that fabulous monarch whohad been the subject of persistent legends since the twelfth century; and it was this Indiato which the Portuguese sought a sea road. They had no idea of a barrier cape far to thesouth, the doubling of which would open a road for them to the west; nor were they, asMr. Vignaud believes, trying to open a route for the spice trade with the Orient. They hadno great spice trade, and did not seek more; what they did seek was an extension of theirordinary trade with Guinea and the African coast. To the maritime world of the fifteenthcentury, then, the South as a geographical region and as a possible point of discovery hadno attractions.


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To the west stretched what was known as the Sea of Darkness, about which even the coolknowledge of the geographers and astronomers could not think steadily. Nothing wasknown about it, it did not lead anywhere, there were no people there, there was no tradein that direction. The tides of history and of life avoided it; only now and then someterrified mariner, blown far out of his course, came back with tales of sea monsters and

enchanted disappearing islands, and shores that receded, and coasts upon which no onecould make a landfall. The farthest land known to the west was the Azores; beyond thatstretched a vague and impossible ocean of terror and darkness, of which the Arabianwriter Xerif al Edrisi, whose countrymen were the sea-kings of the Middle Ages, wrote asfollows:

"The ocean encircles the ultimate bounds of the inhabited earth, and all beyond it isunknown. No one has been able to verify anything concerning it, on account of itsdifficult and perilous navigation, its great obscurity, its profound depth, and frequenttempests; through fear of its mighty fishes and its haughty winds; yet there are manyislands in it, some peopled, others uninhabited. There is no mariner who dares to enter

into its deep waters; or if any have done so, they have merely kept along its coasts,fearful of departing from them. The waves of this ocean, although they roll as high asmountains, yet maintain themselves without breaking; for if they broke it would beimpossible for a ship to plough them."

It is another illustration of the way in which discovery and imagination had hitherto goneby steps and not by flights, that geographical knowledge reached the islands of theAtlantic (none of which were at a very great distance from the coast of Europe or fromeach other) at a comparatively early date, and stopped there until in Columbus there wasfound a man with faith strong enough to make the long flight beyond them to theunknown West. And yet the philosophers, and later the cartographers, true to their

instinct for this pedestrian kind of imagination, put mythical lands and islands to thewestward of the known islands as though they were really trying to make a way, to sinkstepping stones into the deep sea that would lead their thoughts across the unknownspace. In the Catalan map of the world, which was the standard example of cosmographyin the early days of Columbus, most of these mythical islands are marked. There was theisland of Antilia, which was placed in 25 deg. 35' W., and was said to have beendiscovered by Don Roderick, the last of the Gothic kings of Spain, who fled there afterhis defeat by the Moors. There was the island of the Seven Cities, which is sometimesidentified with this Antilia, and was the object of a persistent belief or superstition on thepart of the inhabitants of the Canary Islands. They saw, or thought they saw, about ninetyleagues to the westward, an island with high peaks and deep valleys. The vision wasintermittent; it was only seen in very clear weather, on some of those pure, serene days ofthe tropics when in the clear atmosphere distant objects appear to be close at hand. Incloudy, and often in clear weather also, it was not to be seen at all; but the inhabitants ofthe Canaries, who always saw it in the same place, were so convinced of its reality thatthey petitioned the King of Portugal to allow them to go and take possession of it; andseveral expeditions were in fact despatched, but none ever came up with that fairy land. Itwas called the island of the Seven Cities from a legend of seven bishops who had fledfrom Spain at the time of the Moorish conquest, and, landing upon this island, had


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founded there seven splendid cities. There was the island of St. Brandan, called after theSaint who set out from Ireland in the sixth century in search of an island which alwaysreceded before his ships; this island was placed several hundred miles to the west of theCanaries on maps and charts through out the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There wasthe island of Brazil, to the west of Cape St. Vincent; the islands of Royllo, San Giorgio,

and Isola di Mam; but they were all islands of dreams, seen by the eyes of many marinersin that imaginative time, but never trodden by any foot of man. To Columbus, however,and the mariners of his day, they were all real places, which a man might reach by specialgood fortune or heroism, but which, all things considered, it was not quite worth thewhile of any man to attempt to reach. They have all disappeared from our charts, like theAtlantis of Plato, that was once charted to the westward of the Straits of Gibraltar, and ofwhich the Canaries were believed to be the last peaks unsubmerged.

Sea myths and legends are strange things, and do not as a rule persist in the minds of menunless they have had some ghostly foundation; so it is possible that these fabled islandsof the West were lands that had actually been seen by living eyes, although their position

could never be properly laid down nor their identity assured. Of all the wandering seamenwho talked in the wayside taverns of Atlantic seaports, some must have had strange talesto tell; tales which sometimes may have been true, but were never believed. Vaguerumours hung about those shores, like spray and mist about a headland, of lands seen andlost again in the unknown and uncharted ocean. Doubtless the lamp of faith, the innerlight, burned in some of these storm-tossed men; but all they had was a glimpse here andthere, seen for a moment and lost again; not the clear sight of faith by which Columbussteered his westward course.

The actual outposts of western occupation, then, were the Azores, which were discoveredby Genoese sailors in the pay of Portugal early in the fourteenth century; the Canaries,

which had been continuously discovered and rediscovered since the Phoeniciansoccupied them and Pliny chose them for his Hesperides; and Madeira, which is believedto have been discovered by an Englishman under the following very romantic andmoving circumstances.

In the reign of Edward the Third a young man named Robert Machin fell in love with abeautiful girl, his superior in rank, Anne Dorset or d'Urfey by name. She loved him also,but her relations did not love him; and therefore they had Machin imprisoned upon somepretext or other, and forcibly married the young lady to a nobleman who had a castle onthe shores of the Bristol Channel.

The marriage being accomplished, and the girl carried away by her bridegroom to his seatin the West, it was thought safe to release Machin. Whereupon he collected severalfriends, and they followed the newly-married couple to Bristol and laid their plans for anabduction. One of the friends got himself engaged as a groom in the service of theunhappy bride, and found her love unchanged, and if possible increased by the presentmisery she was in. An escape was planned; and one day, when the girl and her groom


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were riding in the park, they set spurs to their horses, and galloped off to a place on theshores of the Bristol Channel where young Robert had a boat on the beach and a ship inthe offing. They set sail immediately, intending to make for France, where the reunitedlovers hoped to live happily; but it came on to blow when they were off the Lizard, and asoutherly gale, which lasted for thirteen days, drove them far out of their course.

The bride, from her joy and relief, fell into a state of the gloomiest despondency,believing that the hand of God was turned against her, and that their love would never beenjoyed. The tempest fell on the fourteenth day, and at the break of morning the sea-worncompany saw trees and land ahead of them. In the sunrise they landed upon an island fullof noble trees, about which flights of singing birds were hovering, and in which thesweetest fruits, the most lovely flowers, and the purest and most limpid waters abounded.Machin and his bride and their friends made an encampment on a flowery meadow in asheltered valley, where for three days they enjoyed the sweetness and rest of the shoreand the companionship of all kinds of birds and beasts, which showed no signs of fear attheir presence. On the third day a storm arose, and raged for a night over the island; and

in the morning the adventurers found that their ship was nowhere to be seen. The despairof the little company was extreme, and was increased by the condition of poor Anne,upon whom terror and remorse again fell, and so preyed upon her mind that in three daysshe was dead. Her lover, who had braved so much and won her so gallantly, was turnedto stone by this misfortune. Remorse and aching desolation oppressed him; from themoment of her death he scarcely ate nor spoke; and in five days he also was dead, surelyof a broken heart. They buried him beside his mistress under a spreading tree, and put upa wooden cross there, with a prayer that any Christians who might come to the islandwould build a chapel to Jesus the Saviour. The rest of the party then repaired their littleboat and put to sea; were cast upon the coast of Morocco, captured by the Moors, andthrown into prison. With them in prison was a Spanish pilot named Juan de Morales, wholistened attentively to all they could tell him about the situation and condition of theisland, and who after his release communicated what he knew to Prince Henry ofPortugal. The island of Madeira was thus rediscovered in 1418, and in 1425 wascolonised by Prince Henry, who appointed as Governor Bartolomeo de Perestrello, whosedaughter was afterwards to become the wife of Columbus.

So much for the outposts of the Old World. Of the New World, about the possibility ofwhich Columbus is beginning to dream as he sails the Mediterranean, there was noknowledge and hardly any thought. Though new in the thoughts of Columbus, it was veryold in itself; generations of men had lived and walked and spoken and toiled there, eversince men came upon the earth; sun and shower, the thrill of the seasons, birth and lifeand death, had been visiting it for centuries and centuries. And it is quite possible that,long before even the civilisation that produced Columbus was in its dawn, men from theOld World had journeyed there. There are two very old fragments of knowledge whichindicate at least the possibility of a Western World of which the ancients had knowledge.There is a fragment, preserved from the fourth century before Christ, of a conversationbetween Silenus and Midas, King of Phrygia, in which Silenus correctly describes theOld WorldEurope, Asia, and Africaas being surrounded by the sea, but alsodescribes, far to the west of it, a huge island, which had its own civilisation and its own


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laws, where the animals and the men were of twice our stature, and lived for twice ouryears. There is also the story told by Plato of the island of Atlantis, which was larger thanAfrica and Asia together, and which in an earthquake disappeared beneath the waves,producing such a slime upon the surface that no ship was able to navigate the sea in thatplace. This is the story which the priests of Sais told to Solon, and which was embodied

in the sacred inscriptions in their temples. It is strange that any one should think of thistheory of the slime who had not seen or heard of the Sargasso Seathat great bank offloating seaweed that the ocean currents collect and retain in the middle of the basin ofthe North Atlantic.

The Egyptians, the Tartars, the Canaanites, the Chinese, the Arabians, the Welsh, and theScandinavians have all been credited with the colonisation of America; but the only racefrom the Old World which had almost certainly been there were the Scandinavians. In theyear 983 the coast of Greenland was visited by Eric the Red, the son of a Norwegiannoble, who was banished for the crime of murder. Some fifteen years later Eric's son Liefmade an expedition with thirty-five men and a ship in the direction of the new land. They

came to a coast where there were nothing but ice mountains having the appearance ofslate; this country they named Hellulandthat is, Land of Slate. This country is ourNewfoundland. Standing out to sea again, they reached a level wooded country withwhite sandy cliffs, which they called Markland, or Land of Wood, which is our NovaScotia. Next they reached an island east of Markland, where they passed the winter, andas one of their number who had wandered some distance inland had found vines andgrapes, Lief named the country Vinland or Vine Land, which is the country we call NewEngland. The Scandinavians continued to make voyages to the West and South; andfinally Thorfinn Karlsefne, an Icelander, made a great expedition in the spring of 1007with ships and material for colonisation. He made much progress to the southwards, andthe Icelandic accounts of the climate and soil and characteristics of the country leave no

doubt that Greenland and Nova Scotia were discovered and colonised at this time.

It must be remembered, however, that then and in the lifetime of Columbus Greenlandwas supposed tobe a promontory of the coast of Europe, and was not connected inmen's minds with a western continent. Its early discovery has no bearing on thesignificance of Columbus's achievement, the greatness of which depends not on hishaving been the first man from the Old World to set foot upon the shores of the New, buton the fact that by pure faith and belief in his own purpose he did set out for and arrive ina world where no man of his era or civilisation had ever before set foot, or from which nowanderer who may have been blown there ever returned. It is enough to claim for him themerit of discovery in the true sense of the word. The New World was covered from theOld by a veil of distance, of time and space, of absence, invisibility, virtual non-existence; and he discovered it.


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In Portugal

There is no reason to believe that before his twenty-fifth year Columbus was anythingmore than a merchant or mariner, sailing before the mast, and joining one ship afteranother as opportunities for good voyages offered themselves. A change took place later,probably after his marriage, when he began to adapt himself rapidly to a new set of

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Christophercolumbus and the New World by Fils on Young